Gail Fanjoy is among the Millinocket leaders lamenting the loss of a historic downtown building destroyed in a large fire Sunday.
The former bank at 181 Penobscot Ave. is where Fanjoy and her husband got their first car loan. Decades ago, her mother built a career there in a male-dominated field. It is also where her sister worked a summer job and met her future husband.
“It was an institution in our community, but also in my life,” said Fanjoy, who is president of the Katahdin Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors.
The vacant building that went up in flames was deemed a total loss, and the Maine fire marshal’s office is investigating the cause. Thirty-five firefighters from departments in the region battled the blaze from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Two were taken to the hospital with injuries and released later that day, Chief Jonathan Cote said.
The property, built in 1907, was home to the Millinocket Trust Company and one of the first downtown buildings in Millinocket, which was incorporated in 1901, according to the local historical society. Its loss leaves a hole next to the municipal office amid efforts to revitalize the town, once home to the Great Northern Paper Company, which closed in 2008.
Now a pile of rubble sits on the town’s main street less than a month before Maine’s first total solar eclipse since 1963, which is expected to draw an influx of visitors to communities in central and northern parts of the state.
“My biggest hope is they have it cleaned up before the eclipse,” said Amy Collinsworth, Eastern Maine Development Corp.’s economic development director for the region. “With all the people coming, it’s not a site we want potentially tens of thousands of people to witness.”
Robert Benjamin of Two Ducks on an Island LLC in Massachusetts owns the building and other properties in Millinocket, according to tax records. Online listings over the weekend showed the building was on the market for $489,000. Benjamin could not be reached for comment.
The owner will be responsible for cleaning up the site, said Cote, who hasn’t seen a significant commercial fire like this since becoming chief in July. A few nearby businesses received smoke damage, and the town office has five broken windows that are being repaired, he said. The office was closed Monday, but it reopened with its usual business hours on Tuesday.
Trudy Wyman, curator at the Millinocket Historical Society, said the brick building once had a peaked roof, but its look has changed through the decades, including an addition to the back of the building and a drive-thru window.
The building was always a bank, though it changed hands over the years. Fanjoy remembers that after it was the Millinocket Trust Company, it became Northeast Bank, Norstar Bank of Maine and eventually Fleet Bank of Maine.
“Everybody knew everybody in town,” she said. “Local people who were making decisions on loans and different things, and when it became Northeast Bank, a lot of those decisions were transferred to a bigger corporation. That strong local connection started seeping away.”
Although the building’s demise leaves a hole in people’s hearts, Fanjoy is optimistic that the property can become something that is “appealing and healing.” It was an old building that likely needed work inside. Sometimes it’s easier for a business to start with a clean slate, the 70-year-old said.
One of the tools Collinsworth uses to draw prospective businesses to Millinocket is SelectMaineSites, a state website that shows sites available for economic and community development. The bank building is listed there in hopes of attracting an investor, but she will now have to remove it.
“It’s really devastating,” she said. “I think a fire of that magnitude right in downtown Millinocket was shocking to everybody.”
Collinsworth couldn’t say what will happen with the site, but the fire doesn’t deter her from trying to bring new projects to town, she said.
Both Collinsworth and Fanjoy acknowledged that despite a town’s efforts to revitalize and attract new businesses, redevelopment of properties can be challenging when they are privately owned. The town isn’t in the driver’s seat in those cases, Fanjoy said.
Benjamin also owns the property at 75 Penobscot Ave., formerly a bowling alley called Katahdin Pins ‘n Cues. The building’s roof collapsed during a blizzard in February 2017, and eventually the property was razed. Now it is a vacant lot with a chain link fence around it. The property is on the market for $189,900, according to listings.
“I tend to look at things positively and think that even though it’s a tragedy [to lose the bank building], it opens another door to possibility,” Fanjoy said.